Haven S Knight Epub Download

Many of us have long been captivated by images of knights in shining armor evoking the age of chivalry and the ideals of Camelot. In this richly illustrated volume, the beauty and complexity of the actual armor worn by European knights and soldiers comes brilliantly to the fore.

There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass,and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the oppositeside. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always morebeautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was thesmallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink therewere just the beeches, but immediately afterward there was aknight in full armour, standing still and silent and unearthly,among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormouswhite horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in hisright hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smoothjousting lance, which stood up among the tree stumps, higher andhigher, till it was outlined against the velvet sky. All wasmoon-lit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.

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The Wart did not know what to do. He did not know whetherit would be safe to go up to this knight, for there were so manyterrible things in the forest that even the knight might be a ghost.Most ghostly he looked, too, as he hoved meditating on theconfines of the gloom. Eventually the boy made up his mind thateven if it were a ghost, it would be the ghost of a knight, andknights were bound by their vows to help people in distress.

Tilting was a great art and needed practice. When two knightsjousted they held their lances in their right hands, but they directedtheir horses at one another so that each man had his opponent onhis near side. The base of the lance, in fact, was held on theopposite side of the body to the side at which the enemy wascharging. This seems rather inside out to anybody who is in thehabit, say, of opening gates with a hunting-crop, but it had itsreasons. For one thing, it meant that the shield was on the leftarm, so that the opponents charged shield to shield, fully covered.It also meant that a man could be unhorsed with the side or edge ofthe lance, in a kind of horizontal swipe, if you did not feel sure ofhitting him with your point. This was the humblest or leastskilful blow in jousting.

A good jouster, like Lancelot or Tristram, always used the blowof the point, because, although it was liable to miss in unskilfulhands, it made contact sooner. If one knight charged with hislance held rigidly sideways, to sweep his opponent out of the saddle,the other knight with his lance held directly forward would knockhim down a lance length before the sweep came into effect.

"I shall not be a knight," replied the Wart coldly. Merlyn'strick had worked and he no longer wanted to weep: he wanted tokick Merlyn. "I shall not be a knight because I am not a properson of Sir Ector's. They will knight Kay, and I shall be his squire."

"I should have had a splendid suit of armour and dozens ofspears and a black horse standing eighteen hands, and I shouldhave called myself The Black Knight. And I should have hovedat a well or a ford or something and made all true knights thatcame that way to joust with me for the honour of their ladies, andI should have spared them all after I had given them a great fall.And I should live out of doors all the year round in a pavilion, andnever do anything but joust and go on quests and bear away theprize at tournaments, and I should not ever tell anybody my name."

To be able to picture the terrible battle which now took place,there is one thing which ought to be known. A knight in his fullarmour of those days, or at any rate during the heaviest days ofarmour, was generally carrying as much or more than his ownweight in metal. He often weighed no less than twenty-two stone,and sometimes as much as twenty-five. This meant that his horsehad to be a slow and enormous weight-carrier, like the farm horseof today, and that his own movements were so hampered by hisburden of iron and padding that they were toned down into slowmotion, as on the cinema.

Slowly and majestically, the ponderous horses lumbered into awalk. The spears, which had been pointing in the air, bowed to ahorizontal line and pointed at each other. King Pellinore and SirGrummore could be seen to be thumping their horses' sides withtheir heels for all they were worth, and in a few minutes thesplendid animals had shambled into an earth-shaking imitation ofa trot. Clank, rumble, thump-thump went the horses, and nowthe two knights were flapping their elbows and legs in unison,showing a good deal of daylight at their seats. There was achange in tempo, and Sir Grummore's horse could be definitelyseen to be cantering. In another minute King Pellinore's wasdoing so too. It was a terrible spectacle.

There was a long pause, while the complicated stations of thetwo knights readjusted themselves, and then King Pellinore was atthe opposite end from that at which he had started, while SirGrummore faced him from his original position.

But the two mounts were patiently blundering together, and thetwo knights had simultaneously decided on the sweeping stroke.Each held his spear at right angles toward the left, and, before theWart could say anything further, there was a terrific yet melodiousthump. Clang! went the armour, like a motor omnibus in collisionwith a smithy, and the jousters were sitting side by side on thegreen sward, while their horses cantered off in opposite directions.

The knights had now lost their tempers and the battle was joinedin earnest. It did not matter much, however, for they were soencased in metal that they could not do each other much damage.It took them so long to get up, and the dealing of a blow when youweighed the eighth part of a ton was such a cumbrous business,that every stage of the contest could be marked and pondered.

With this they summoned all their energies together for onedecisive encounter, leaned forward, lowered their heads like twobilly-goats, and positively sprinted together for the final blow.Alas, their aim was poor. They missed each other by about fiveyards, passed at full steam doing at least eight knots, like ships thatpass in the night but speak not to each other in passing, and hurtledonward to their doom. Both knights began waving their armslike windmills, anti-clockwise, in the vain effort to slow up. Bothcontinued with undiminished speed. Then Sir Grummore rammedhis head against the beech in which the Wart was sitting, and KingPellinore collided with a chestnut at the other side of the clearing.The trees shook, the forest rang. Blackbirds and squirrels cursedand wood-pigeons flew out of their leafy perches half a mile away.The two knights stood to attention while one could count three.Then, with a last unanimous melodious clang, they both fellprostrate on the fatal sward.

All the hawks were silent as Merlyn carried their new companioninto the mews, and silent for some time afterward when they hadbeen left in the dark. The rain had given place to a full Augustmoonlight, so clear that you could see a woolly bear caterpillarfifteen yards away out of doors, as it climbed up and up the knobblysandstone of the great keep, and it took the Wart only a fewmoments for his eyes to become accustomed to the diffusedbrightness inside the mews. The darkness became watered with light,with silver radiance, and then it was an eerie sight which dawnedupon his vision. Each hawk or falcon stood in the silver upon oneleg, the other tucked up inside the apron of its panel, and each wasa motionless statue of a knight in armour. They stood gravely intheir plumed helmets, spurred and armed. The canvas or sackingscreens of their perches moved heavily in a breath of wind, likebanners in a chapel, and the rapt nobility of the air kept theirknight's vigil in knightly patience. In those days they used to hoodeverything they could, even the goshawk and the merlin, which areno longer hooded according to modern practice.

The ant finished fiddling with its corpses and turned back downthe pathway, leaving them in the haphazard order. It found thatthe Wart was in its way, so it stopped, waving its wireless aerialsat him as if it were a tank. With its mute, menacing helmet ofa face, and its hairiness, and the things like spurs on the frontleg-joint, perhaps it was more like a knight-in-armour on anarmoured horse: or like a combination of the two, a hairycentaur-in-armour.

But you could hardly ask a fellow to hunt up a few beasts ofvenery for you, and then not invite him to the meet. While, ifyou did invite him to the meet, what would the King's huntsmanand the neighbours say at havin' a partisan for a fellow guest?Not that this Robin Wood was not a good fellow: he was a goodchap, and a good neighbour too. He had often tipped Sir Ectorthe wink when a raiding party was on its way from the Marches,and he never molested the knight or his farming in any way.What did it matter if he did chase himself a bit of venison now andthen? There was four hundred square miles of forest, so theysaid, and enough for all. Leave well alone, that was Sir Ector'smotto. But that did not alter the neighbours.

"Shut your mouth," replied the King at once. "Don't standthere bleating like a fool, man. Do something. Fetch anotherpole so that we can carry old Glatisant home. Now, then, Ector,haven't you got any sense? We must just carry him home and puthim in front of the kitchen fire. Send somebody on to make somebread and milk. And you, Twyti, or whatever you choose to callyourself, stop fiddling with that trumpet of yours and run ahead toget some blankets warmed.

"No. You go to the chapel again then, and Kay offers hissword to the vicar, and the vicar gives it back to him, and afterthat our good cook over there meets him at the door and claimshis spurs as a reward, and says, 'I shall keep these spurs for you,and if at any time you don't behave as a true knight should do,why, I shall pop them in the soup.'" be457b7860